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lincolnquirk comments on Upcoming meet-ups: Buenos Aires, Minneapolis, Ottawa, Edinburgh, Cambridge, London, DC - Less Wrong
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As noted, the Boston / Cambridge meetup group has a meeting approximately every other Sunday at 2pm in Kendall. This week we also have a bonus activity.
As LW user Chronophasiac describes it:
Total wow that you are attempting this! As well as being awesome, rebuilding the tech tree has clear saving-the-world implications so I'm totally in favour. Make sure to document the project on a blog.
(I feel like someone has tried this before but my Googling doesn't show anything up. If there is a book or blog out there it might give you some useful tips. Make sure you don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to reinventing the wheel).
Nick Szabo discusses a related idea here and here. Specifically, finding small subsets of modern technology that can be used to recreate the rest, and ideally also create more copies of themselves.
Did it work?
Well, we failed pretty badly.
The friction methods appear horrendously difficult to actually implement. We were unable to produce an ember with an electric drill, using a dry pine dowel and board.
What's our next plan? Someone at the meetup suggested making a lens to focus the sunlight out of clear ice. I think we might have a shot at getting that to work, though we'd have to freeze the ice ourselves.
I think the main issue was that, doing this in an urban setting, we didn't have access to natural wood; the wood we brought was sanded, probably pressure-treated, and (while the packaging didn't say anything about that) possibly also treated with chemicals to make it hard to burn. It was also humid (it had just rained) and windy.
All the below quotes on fire-making are from Primitive Technology, a Book of Earth Skills, a copy of which I have lying around.
"Your biggest chore will be finding the right materials in your part of the world. If possible, find out what the local ancients used; they know best since their survival depended on these materials...The char you produce will be your best clue as to whether or not the materials you have chosen will work. If your hand drill is producing large amounts of very finely textured char quickly, then you have the right materials...Downward pressure is equally as important as spinning speed...Once you have your smoldering ember, remain calm. The ember will burn for quite awhile, giving you plenty of time to carefully place it into the tinder nest and gently fan it into flames."--"Tips for First Time Hand-drill Friction Fire Makers", Paul Schweighardt
"A quicker test [of whether a piece of wood will work for fire-making] is to examine the char that is ground off as you twirl the spindle on the hearth board. The rule of thumb, literally, is to run the char between thumb and forefinger. If it is coarse and gritty then reject that particular piece of wood. If it is very fine, like face powder, then you have a good chance of twirling up a fire."--"The Miracle of Fire by Friction", Dick Baugh
There is also a list of species found in the San Francisco Bay area that are good for spindles, hearth boards, and tinder. I don't know how much overlap there would be with your region, but I see cottonwood (Populus) and box elder (Acer negundo) listed as good for both hearth boards and spindles, and you might could get ahold of them.
Keep us posted!